"Let him mature the strength of his imagination among the things of this earth," Joseph Conrad

02/03/2008

Night driving / Under Milk Wood

This is my favourite advert of the last year and kind of makes me want to listen to the whole of Richard Burton's reading of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. There is a longer version of the advert on the car maker's site, and you can edit your own version (check out the Michael Jackson like moonwalker). It is all very Michael Mann. The music is also wonderful - it is from Cliff Martinez's soundtrack for Solaris.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yard; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.

Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.